Things I talked about with Meade this morning.

1. How Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that Bari Weiss is a fraud and not honest at all. She called Tulsi Gabbard a "toady" and she didn't know what "toady" meant.

2. The similarities and differences between the Bob Dylan song "You Got to Serve Somebody" and the Band song "Unfaithful Servant."

3. The use of the tuba in popular music recorded in the last 60 years and why it matters if they had an actual tuba player in the studio as opposed to a digitalized tuba sound.

4. "Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole."

5. Whether flags of foreign countries should be waved by members of Congress and how the use of the flag may mean different things to different people.

6. It was Richard Nixon who originated the wearing of a flag lapel pin and how everyone followed along and now they can't stop.

7. The way some people these days are calling their loved one "my person." I heard it in Salman Rushdie's new book "Knife" and I opened The New Yorker at random and saw it in a Roz Chast cartoon.

8. Some people call a dog's owner the dog's "person," and that seems related to the old joke "Are you walking him or is he walking you"?

9. Bill Maher asked why people want drag queens reading to children and said it would be better to have disabled people reading, but drag queens are entertainers and disabled people are not. 

10. How little children shouldn't be exposed to overly exciting entertainment and even peekaboo can be too intense for young minds.

11. How it's already too late to go south for warmer weather and we are better off here in the north, where there was frost on the grass this morning.

12. How fluent and funny Tucker Carlson was describing his boss at the New York Post who had a hairy back that he would rub against the door jamb while he talked to Tucker and the 5 or 6 ways that Tucker could have known that the man had a hairy back.

13. What a big part of life hairiness is — for the lower animals and for us, the humans. 

14. Was the hairy-backed man John Podhoretz? Carlson mutters the name.

15. The annoyingness of Carlson's laugh and how hard you have to commit to do a good enough imitation of it.

16. The energy Joe and Tucker had. Doesn't Tucker wear a hairpiece and Joe just shaved off all his hair.

17. Meeting for coffee and not an entire meal so you're free to leave whenever you want and how some people have trouble getting out of small-talk conversations and this one simple trick that's all you need.

18. The perception that a conversation can't end until both participants want it to end and the way some people keep adding new topics as if keeping a conversation going is a game.

19. The very low level of tennis playing that has you just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

20. How all this talk is taking the place of writing on the blog, but I could just make a blog post out of all the topics that didn't make it onto the blog because I was talking about everything with Meade.

"When it gets hot enough, as it has across the South in recent weeks, barefoot toddlers suffer second-degree burns from stepping onto concrete."

"People who fall on the blistering pavement wind up with skin grafts. Kids stay inside all day, 'trying to survive.' Windshield wipers glue themselves in place, and the ocean transfers heat back into your body. One electric blackout could bake thousands to death inside their homes. You would think people would flee such a hellscape expeditiously. But as record-breaking heat fries the Sun Belt, the region’s popularity only grows. The numbers, laid out recently in The Economist, are striking: 12 of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are in the Sun Belt."

I'm reading an Atlantic article that purports to answer the question I've been asking: "Why People Won’t Stop Moving to the Sun Belt."

But does this article really know why people do what they do? The author gives us 3 reasons: 1. cheap housing, 2. "a 'business-friendly' environment," and 3. warm winters. That is, on point 3, the weather is still a reason to go there, not a reason to escape. Ah, well, the fear of the cold is deep-seated. 

Here I am, lying on a nearly empty beach on the shore of Lake Superior, on August 14th, wearing 2 layers of long-sleeved shirt, experiencing what to me is the perfect temperature — 62°:

Why isn't everyone here? Ah, well, I like the emptiness. The sand was very fine and soft, the water perfectly clear... and swimmable if you're hale and exuberant. 

"We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with 'Good choice,' 'Excellent' or even 'Awesome.' "

"You want fries with that? 'Awesome!'...  [O]n our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to 'Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.' I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater. But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes...."

From "Prue Leith’s Great American Road Trip/The 'Great British Baking Show' judge steps out of the tent to sample the flavors of the U.S. on a 2,200-mile drive" (NYT).

"Out-of-Towners Head to 'Climate-Proof Duluth'/The former industrial town in Minnesota is coming to terms with its status as a refuge for people moving from across the country because of climate change."

A NYT article.

I took global warming seriously in 1984 when I decided to move to Madison, Wisconsin. I thought within about 10 years, everyone would notice the South had become unlivable, and a massive population shift would occur. Well, 40 years have passed, and it's just beginning to happen, this migration to the Upper Midwest. But I bet most people in the South will just laugh at this idea.

From the article:

I've got 5 TikToks to scare away the darkness on this first standard-time evening.

1. The nicest thing she's ever done for anyone is something she's going to do in the future.

2. You don't think — just because you're punk — I only want the cool people to like me.

3. Polar night is not depressing.

4. The kindergarten teacher tries to tell her class that she just got engaged.

5. A 1955 cake recipe calls for two 27-ounce cans of pinto beans.

I've curated 5 TikTok videos for you tonight. Let me know what you like.

1. Awaiting the first sunset since April.

2. A wasp cut of a cold cut.

3. "No, it's Baron of Bad News."

4. Baron Ryan on the age-old subject, Nothing is something.

5. "Be absolutely miserable, but change nothing...."

"There is such a bias toward glorifying hot weather and vilifying cold, though a lot of people strongly prefer winter to summer."

"I don't really get depressed in the summer, but I dread it because of the extreme discomfort & nothing to do for it but stay indoors. Winter, on the other hand, is completely manageable by dressing properly."

Says a commenter on "Seasonal Affective Disorder Isn’t Just for Winter/Feeling blue even though everyone seems to be basking in perfect summer weather? There might be a good reason for that" (NYT).  

That was originally published a year ago, but it's on the NYT home page today, presumably because it's great Memorial Day weekend topic: Some of us don't love summer. If you suffer in winter, you have lots of vocal company. And if you enjoy winter, other people are always interfering with the pleasure by openly complaining about it. But there's an excessive celebration of the greatness of summer. If you feel bad in the summer, you might feel harassed by the pressure to join in all this purported fun.

Here's another comment from over there:

I've handpicked 7 TikToks. Let me know what you like best.

1. A scary tower (in Sri Lanka).

2. Nipa palm fruit.

3. Preschool Trump calls "fake news" on the teacher's announcement of "last day of school."

4. Life inside the Arctic Circle — sunlight in the middle of the night.

5. The street artist encounters a drain.

6. "you're breaking up with me but there's a squirrel outside eating at the squirrel table."

7. Hey, everybody, hi... it's the toast rack.

What do you mean? They look like they could be on the shore of Lake Mendota, here in Madison!

I'm reading "In Nova Scotia, Homes as Wild as the Landscape Around Them/Across the province’s cliffside fishing towns, Omar Gandhi’s residential architecture is as austere and intense as the environment for which it’s built" (NYT Style Magazine):

Though Gandhi’s projects are dramatically different in form, such consideration of their remote, subarctic backdrop connects them to one another — they “look like they could only be in Nova Scotia,” he says. It’s a slow, tough place, surrounded either by water that seems like it might be happier as ice or, on the southern coast, by trees so sparse and stunted that they probably would have preferred to grow elsewhere.

I love the photographs — and here are more photos at the architect's website — but they look like right here in Madison, right now. I guess our trees are bigger, but the land overlooking cold water is not like something faraway to me. It looks like my town.

"The extreme isolation and hardness of the landscape is what drew me here, too. I took the trip with my partner Noah."

"Both of our marriages had recently ended, and in our 40s, we were suddenly rootless, dislocated in a way neither of us had expected. It was as though we’d sat on the shoreline, watching a glacier crumble into the ocean. We’d found each other, but our relationship was still new and untested. Perhaps we’d been drawn to the Arctic to see if anything permanent in the world still existed.... We booked a room at Funken Lodge.... We’d made New Year’s Eve dinner reservations at Huset... The main course showcased local reindeer two ways... accompanied by strands of salty kelp harvested from the island’s shoreline and microgreens provided by the island’s sole greenhouse, a pink geodesic dome visible from the main road.... A few minutes before midnight, Noah and I pulled our coats and boots on and half-stumbled, half-skated to the edge of the parking lot between the restaurant and the high wall of the glacier. Some of the kitchen staff lit off fireworks...."

From "Greeting the New Year in Earth’s Northernmost Settlement/In Svalbard, above the Arctic Circle, you can’t be born and you can’t be buried, but you can find renewal in the dark of winter/The northern-most greenhouse dome in the world provides microgreens to a local restaurant" by Kelly McMasters (in the NYT).

Later, the author and her companion Noah enjoy a sauna and — this is how the article ends — "My sweat felt like all the stars in the sky were wrapped around my body in a blanket, little spears of heat and ice, and when I turned to Noah his skin was bathed in silver, as if his body was part of the aurora itself."

Here's the top-rated comment: "As someone who has unbridled passion and respect for the Arctic, I am truly disappointed in the lack of respect and depth you seem to have of your Svalbard experience. Having been to to Svalbard and the Arctic in many countries around the globe, you fail to capture or even seriously understand the incredible value, beauty, uniqueness and importance this precious place has on our earth. I am not a scientist, simply a traveler who seeks to grow and learn about myself and this world with respect. The Arctic should not be the next hot bucket list destination that one can say 'yeah I have been aka aren’t I cool?' NYT, you can and should do better."

Oh! But all the stars and spears of sweat and Noah's silver body and the reindeer two ways!

"While many of us are familiar with SAD, there are, in fact, people who get SAD in reverse."

"For a small group of people, the dark days of winter don’t elicit depression, but renewed vigor and improved mood.... While winter SAD is linked to a lack of sunlight, it is thought that summer SAD is due to the reverse—possibly too much sunlight, which also lead to modulations in melatonin production.... Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant and free radical scavenger that serves to protect the brain. However, more importantly, melatonin’s immediate precursor is the neurotransmitter serotonin, a major player in regulating mood. By reducing melatonin production, SAD increases the risk for depression and other mood disorders.... [T]hose who experience reverse SAD will take comfort in knowing that the winter months can bring nothing but bliss with the gloriousness of gray skies, 15-hours of darkness, and bone-chilling winds."

That's from Psychology Today (in 2015). I'm reading that after someone on Facebook linked to "The Obsessed Ex-Fortysomething Runner: Brown eyes, SAD, and 'reverse' SAD."

I call the 30 days with the winter solstice in the center "Darkmonth," and it's just beginning. You might wonder why I'm not hot to move somewhere brighter than Wisconsin, now that I'm retired and could relocate anywhere. Maybe my preferences have to do with eye color.

Here's another article about the new study by a psychology professor at the University of South Wales. "[H]e found that those with brown eyes were significantly more likely to experience seasonal mood shifts than those with blue eyes... 'Individuals with blue eyes appear to have a degree of resilience to SAD'..."

As for "reverse SAD," it should be noted that you can wear sunglasses! I think a blue-eyed person artificially creates the equivalent of brown eyes in the summertime. So maybe the North is a good place for me....

Living in The North.

It's going all the way up to 75° today, so we've got all the windows open to maximize the chill and fortify us against the coming heat. Right now — and I'm typing in front of 2 big windows — it's 54°.

"I like to build a snow cave, fill it with candlelight and drink a bottle of red wine with my friends. We go outside and smell the snow."

"I live in a small village by the ocean with 300 inhabitants, mostly fishermen and old people. There are also three moose and two eagles who have joined us. I see lots of fish, birds and wildlife just outside my window. It’s a good substitute for the darkness, which does affect your mood."

Writes Gunda Hackbarth of Helnessund, Norway, one of many people quoted in "Snapshots From a Land of Endless Night/Readers describe the thrills and challenges of wintertime in the Far North." (NYT).

And here's Frank Stelges from 25 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska:

You still do a lot of things in the dark and my forehead carries the permanent imprint of my headlamp. I spend nearly the whole day outside chopping firewood for our house (we live off the grid), maintaining trails, plowing, going on walks with our dogs, snowshoeing, skiing, winter biking. It’s just great.

And: "We have a saying here in Norway: 'There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.'"

"The full ranking of states, from the fastest-talking to the slowest..."

"1. Oregon 2. Minnesota 3. Massachusetts 4. Kansas 5. Iowa 6. Vermont 7. Alaska 8. South Dakota 9. New Hampshire 10. Nebraska 11. Connecticut 12. North Dakota 13. Washington 14. Wisconsin..."

How far down the list do you need to go to get to a southern state? To #17, Florida. But you have to go to #28 to get to another southern state (Virginia), and a lot of northerners relocate to Florida.

How far up from the bottom of the list do you need to go to get to a northern state? To #41, Ohio.

"I called this place ‘America’s worst place to live.’ Then I went there."

From WaPo writer Christopher Ingraham (who "writes about politics, drug policy and all things data" and "previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center"). It ends:

There's perhaps something amiss in a ranking that places Red Lake County at the absolute bottom of the nation when it comes to scenery and climate. As I noted in my original story, the USDA's index places a lot of emphasis on mild weather and a little less on true scenic beauty, which of course is harder to quantify. But there's no doubt that the Red Lake County region is flat-out gorgeous. In a phone interview, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar called it a "stark beauty," and I think she's right. And you can see that beauty everywhere, from the open farm country to the craggy bluffs and hills of the river valley.

For some of us, it takes a place as small as Red Lake County to drive home just how big this country really is.

Lists that take account of climate are going to systematically undervalue The North. That said, Ingraham did not visit in winter.

Non-Wisconsinites, I need to explain something about Scott Walker to you that you are missing.

Those of you who think that he's a neophyte, that he hasn't yet learned how to step up to answering a question. You don't get it. You are a neophyte. You haven't yet learned how to step up to understanding Scott Walker.

I'm talking to people like WaPo's Dana Milbank, who wrote a column called "Scott Walker’s cowardice should disqualify him," based on Scott Walker's response to Rudy Giulian'is "I do not believe that the president loves America."

And Walker, just a few seats away, said... nothing. Asked the next morning on CNBC about Giuliani’s words, the Republican presidential aspirant was spineless: "The mayor can speak for himself. I’m not going to comment on what the president thinks or not. He can speak for himself as well. I’ll tell you, I love America, and I think there are plenty of people — Democrat, Republican, independent, everyone in between — who love this country."

But did he agree with Giuliani? "I’m in New York," Walker demurred. "I’m used to people saying things that are aggressive out there."

It's interesting that Walker was right there when Giuliani said that, yet he didn't rise to the bait, but it's exactly what I'm used to seeing in the doggedly on-message Walker. He's rock-solidly used to this sort of situation. I think back to the debates he had with Tom Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor who was his opponent in the 2012 recall election.

In the first debate, Barrett, standing right next to Walker, did all he could to turn up the heat, saying Walker "tore this state apart" and started "a political civil war." Walker never quarreled over these inflammatory characterizations. He'd go straight to his message: This is "about our reforms, which are working."

In the second debate, the 2 men were sitting next to each other at a table, and the candidates were encouraged to talk to each other. I said:

This is a great format with the men sitting side by side. Barrett — a larger man — leans toward the governor and speaks with urgency and stress. Walker seems more relaxed. He's earnest, gesturing and explaining. Walker's theme is: the taxpayers.

As in the first debates, Barrett kept calling Governor Walker "Scott," and Walker steadfastly called Mayor Barrett "the mayor." Barrett kept up with the inflammatory tone, at one point accusing Walker of "ripping my face off." As one of my commenters said:

What struck me most was the imperious yet at the same time perplexed look Barrett directed at Walker almost constantly. A combination of ridiculous pomposity and pathetic passivity. Amazing he could pull off such a combo. A talent of sorts, I guess -- for doing himself in. Walker looked relaxed and human and never once reciprocated with any form of rudeness such as he was getting.

Go to 31:33 to 32:00 in the video to see what "ridiculous pomposity and pathetic passivity" looks like.

After all of that, do you really think Walker would feel compelled to weigh in on what the former mayor of New York City spouts off about Obama? Absolutely not. Giuliani was deploying some colorful New-York-City-style rhetoric and purporting to know the emotional contents of the President's heart. There's nothing worth responding to, and the no response is the Wisconsin man's response to nothing. He was "in New York" and "used to people saying things that are aggressive out there."

Implicit in that is: That's not Wisconsin style. Get used to it, coasties.

ADDED: I'M WALKER HERE!

Do Americans get the Midwest? Can a candidate with a midwestern accent and demeanor ever get elected?

When's the last time we elected a Midwesterner President? Ford doesn't count. He wasn't elected. You have to go back to Eisenhower and by the time we elected him, he wasn't just from Kansas anymore. He was from The World — The World War. And Kansas isn't even really the Midwest I think of as the Midwest. It's too far south. When's the last time we had a President from the North that is not the East?

Here's a list the home states of all the Presidents. I was surprised to see that I could have said we have a President right now from the Midwest! It never occurred to me — even as I rewatched that Bloggingheads segment — to think of Barack Obama as a Midwesterner, despite his connection to Illinois. His demeanor and his accent don't come across as midwestern. I think of him as coming from Hawaii.

I think we've never had a President from the North that is not the East. We've had a lot of Presidents from Ohio, and in that video clip, where I'm talking about Scott Walker's chances as a midwestern-style person, Bob Wright gets fixated on Ohio Governor Kasich, but Ohio isn't what I mean when I say Midwest. Note that I have lived in Wisconsin for the last 30 years, so I have an idea of the Midwest (and the North), but I consider myself from the "mid-Atlantic region," born and mostly raised in Delaware — just about exactly at the place where the Mason-Dixon line would cross if the mapmakers hadn't switched to using a compass when drawing the head on the little man called Delaware....



I am an insider/outsider in the Midwest. I think I get the cultural style that one sees in people like Tim Pawlenty and Scott Walker who seem too bland for outsiders. I mean that I also get The Not Getting of It. It might help that my mother and her family were from Michigan. Bob is from Texas, which is a big place, so maybe that's why he blithely groups Wisconsin with Ohio. He also sneered at the notion that Delaware is the South. I forgot to ply him with the question whether Texas is the South, but we were running out of time.

This post has become a grab bag of issues, so I'll load in one more, because news broke as I was writing this: "Lindsey Graham officially launches presidential exploratory committee." In the Bloggingheads clip embedded above, I talked about the problem of a Southern accent for a Republican candidate and say I think Americans have trouble with Lindsey Graham because of his accent. But the discussion of Midwesterners is not so much about the accent — though it is a problem if it's too exaggerated (as in the movie "Fargo") — it's the modest, low-key, seemingly bland style. But that problem could be an advantage. People might be in the mood for modest blandness. Of course, Scott Walker's opponents won't accept that picture of the man. They demonize him. How do you demonize modest blandness? Oh, it's an old game here intra-Wisconsin.